12v Solar Charge Controller Buyers Guide - Beginner Friendly!

in today's video we're gonna be covering solar charge controllers and we're gonna do like a ultimate buyer's guide I'm gonna tell you guys how these differ and we're gonna do a real-world test comparison with two identical solar panels with a lithium iron phosphate battery and I tried to get a manufacturer to sponsor this video but they said they do not like my comparison videos at all they said that if I review like this MPPT I have to have only this one in the video and I was like I don't want to do that I want to see how it compares to the other ones so I had to buy all of these with my own cash through Amazon and I think some of the results are gonna surprise you guys and so I built this test station and we can now use it to test any kind of solar power system component that we want so we have these two wires that go outside to two identical 100 watt monocrystalline solar panels and they have the same gauge and strand count of copper and they go to solar input 1 and solar input number 2 so these watt meters tell us how much power is going into the solar charge controller and we have two wires they go out to these 2 watt meters and we have controller output number one and controller output number two and then these connect to the battery the lithium iron phosphate 12 volt battery and then we have a watt meter at the battery and also another amp meter to verify results and then this watt meter is to show us how much power it uses at night time during standby to see if there's a big difference there so I'm able to test various solar charge controllers and I tried to buy a variety of charge controllers so this could be an interesting comparison so first we have rebranded once and these are identical but they actually have some subtle differences I found out and then we have an expensive and a cheap pulse width modulation controller we have an expensive MPPT and a cheap one we have my favorite one that I'm super biased to in this it's not sponsored at all but this is an amazing solar charge controller and then we have these new ones this one has like a screen and you can pop this out and put different modules inside and then we have the super popular tracer wood by ep ever and this one's pretty good too so before we test these controllers I want to give a general overview of what to look for and what features and quality of materials that you need solar charge controller and so we have these two solar charge controllers that are rebranded in a lot of distributors for solar power system components simply put their own label on there or they'll change the color scheme like this one's orange and this one's blue but with their energy you will notice that at the bottom the input terminals are a very tiny weak and flimsy and in some of the reviews you'll find that these can break and you can also strip out the screws when you're tightening them down and because this is 20 amp you can get by with a 10 or 12 gauge wire and it will barely fit it but because I want minimal losses between the controller and the battery and for safety reasons I want to over gauge these wires and so that is one of the features I like to look for if you compare it to rich solar even though it's the exact same MPPT it has different input terminals and these are very thick and strong and you can put a very large wire in there even though this is a 20 amp I could fit like a 6 gauge wire in there so that is a huge benefit you always want to check the input terminals and even compare it to a victor on this is a lot more expensive than the rich solar MPPT but it has just these circuit board mounted cheap weak flimsy ones and these work alright but they're so small compared to the rich solar and to these other ones this is a 20 amp one as well and it has bigger way bigger than the Vic Tron and that's where the victor on really fails is the input terminals and that's one of the most common problems I see people have with solar charge controllers is they do not use thick enough gauge wires between the charge controller in the battery or it breaks at the circuit board and when that happens this can burn out and can actually overheat and cause a fire so it's very important to have strong input terminals such as the rich solar or the EP evers but if you look at Vic Tron or renergie they have these tiny dinky ones and also the 15 dollar ones it looks funny is yeah these are the same size the 15 dollar controller in the $150 Vic Tron have the same size input terminals it's just cheap they need to use something strong like these EP Evers use in the charge controller with the best input terminal are these these are huge and super solid and I can use this screwdriver and crank it down these are the best ones on the market that I've ever found the next thing that we need to talk about is if it has temperature compensation if you're using a lead acid battery you need to have it this one is really cheap and it doesn't have it and if your batteries are really hot and it tries to charge on a full rate and you have a small battery you can hurt your battery and so you need to have temperature compensation usually you'll see temp sensor timp right here um all of these have it but the super cheap ones do not have it now we're going to talk about the quality of materials that they use most of these are made with cheap hollow plastic and this one feels like a McDonald's kids toy and I have a friend that works at a distributor for solar power system components and he said that he buys these from China for $3 and then they sell them on Amazon for like fifteen to twenty dollars and you can tell by what kind of plastic they use it's very cheap I mean this one has cheap shiny plastic and it looks like a kid's toy like I do not like this this will not affect performance that much but you can tell how much money they're actually putting into these things now compare all of these plastic ones to the victor on this one is high-quality nylon and it does not feel like a kid's toy it looks really good it's strong solid stuff now compare all of these to my favorite one where it's die cast aluminum the whole thing is pure metal and it can dissipate heat really nicely they put a lot more money into this one and there's not as much empty space in it so like inside of this one if you tear this apart there's a lot of empty air space inside on this one all of its being utilized as a heat sink so this is most ideal circumstance for a case material the next thing to look for is if it has a readout screen so that you can see how much power is going through your charge controller if you can change the charge profile parameters if you can do data log you can see the temperature of the battery all of that good stuff and most of these actually have its own screen even the cheap fifteen dollar one has its own screen the one that doesn't have its own screen and doesn't even have an option for finding out how much power going through it is this one the renergie but this one's a very bare-bones super cheap one so I understand why I'm the ones that don't have the screams Oh like the victor on energy in this one you connect your own screen or you connect it to bluetooth to your phone so with the victor on Energy you connect it to your phone with Bluetooth and it shows you data logging for the last month every day how much power is going through it you can change the charge profile parameters you can see the temperature of things it's really nice this one has the best interface of them all it's great fun but for this one and for the EP Evers you can use the MT 50 screen and I like not having a screen on the solar charge controller itself because it can use more power and who is going to have their solar charge controller in a accessible place near your living area for most solar power systems the batteries and all this other stuff is going to be in a battery compartment or far away from your living area so what I like to do is I'd like to have no screen on it like this one and then I run a wire to the MT 50 screen and then I put this in the living area and so that's really important you can also though connect it to this one but then you'll have two screens which is fine or you can connect it to this one right here with the comport but I really like having a remote display the Bluetooth is ideal but I wonder how much power it uses throughout the day because it's always on I'm not sure if there's an option to turn it off but yeah it's really nice and convenient but this costs more money to have the Bluetooth connection these victor ons are not cheap so what I personally like is this one again I love this thing it has all the features I need I've tried all of them and then you have this for remote viewing in your living area so this is really good you can change everything you can use this with a Tesla battery you can use it with any battery you want but it's harder to program than the Victor on if you're using a custom lithium battery bank the Victor on is the best one I just hate all these other things about it and the heatsink I mean this thing gets hot compared to this thing but also understand that a lot of system monitoring you don't really need if you have a well designed system and it produces the power that you need you shouldn't have check the screen at all I like having the screen to see system stats for the first like month of using a system but after that I don't want to look at that screen all the time I want a solar power system that powers my stuff without even thinking about it so if you're having to check the screen all the time maybe you should redesign your system or add more solar panels or build a bigger battery bank she leads us to how easy it is to program these and that's the next feature that we want to talk about so even though these have screens some of them are a lot harder to program than others but it really depends on how much you need a program if you're building a do-it-yourself prismatic cell lithium ion phosphate battery you're gonna have to go with either a Victor on or an EP ever that has an MT 50 screen you cannot use any of these because these you can change it to like a lithium iron phosphate drop and let us at replacement which goes to fourteen point four volts but if you want to set the upper voltage limit like a custom profile you just can't do it you're supposed to be able to connect it to your computer but I've always failed in every single person that has had this has complained same with their energy these are the same things the interface is the same and I can never get these to program properly I can get the EP ever to program with my computer but it's a pain in the butt and I do not recommend anybody even trying that even attempting it is a waste of time if you're using the EP Evers you have to use the MT 50 screen to program it but if you have a custom battery and you don't want to have any difficulties the victor on is going to be the best you connect it to your phone and you tell exactly which numbers to do and it's done and set this one you can change the float voltage but I don't think you can change anything else and this one though these are really good if you have standard lead acid batteries because if you just want to connect up your system and not check it that much this works really well and this is very easy to program for standard battery sizes and all of these are very easy to program for standard ones but like I said if you're doing a custom battery Vic Tron or ep ever with MT 50 this one right here has one button and says green lightning sealed orange is gel and red is flooded and you tap it or you hold it down and then this one changes to that color and so if you have a standard battery that's not lithium this works really well but this is very bare-bones if you want to change the upper voltage limit and change your charge cycle life over time this is not what you want you're gonna have to have one of these other ones for most people using sealed lead-acid all of these will work you just connect it and you don't have to worry about it so a lot of you guys that might not even apply to you and all thing that confuses people that we need to talk about is they think that if you have two separate solar charge controllers attached to a single battery that they'll fight each other and it will reduce the output of one of the charge controllers but you can clearly see here 48 watts going into the battery from one controller 48 watts going in from another controller so there's no fighting going on if you have two solar charge controllers that just does not happen it's not how these things work today is a super sunny day so we're gonna test the output of these charge controllers with these two panels that are exactly the same they are the same temperature they are tilted the same and then we have these two wires that go under here all the way up to the window of the RV to our test station and so for our first test we have a cheap PWM in a more expensive one and at the battery we have 69 watts going in and 69 watts going in so these two controllers have the same output and in all honesty even though this one has the screen I would prefer this one just because it's nicer to look at and it has a temperature sensor so this one wins my pulse width modulation controller test for the next test we have rebranded rich solar in renergie MPPT and over here we have 71 watts for the renergie we have 71 watts for the ridge so they're the same but this one has better input terminals if you were choosing between these two I would get the rich solar one so for this comparison we have ep ever tracer which is super popular and then this rich solar is probably the cheapest MPPT that we have and right here we have 72 watts and 72 watts so they're practically the same now we have two EP Evers this one's a 20 amp and this is the 30 amp we've got 73 watts and 73 watts so again they're all the same so now it's time to make this test a little interesting we have our most expensive MPPT and our cheapest MPPT and right now we've got 72 watts right here in 72 watts right here so whether you buy the Vic Tron or you buy this like 70 or $80 one they still produce the same amount of power and after doing this test several times on my own I've noticed that the difference between these is not the power output but it's the tracking speed or how fast it takes for this to find the power point this one takes about 20 seconds and it's producing power the moment I plug panels in this one it takes thirty Seconds to a minute to find the power point so this one's a bit faster also this one is just as fast as this EP every one this is also my fastest tracking one but I've noticed that when I tested over time like the kilowatt hour throughout a day the fast tracking doesn't change much if you have a bunch of trees shading it constantly this one might give you a couple more watt hours but it's not that big of a difference but it is a difference so I just had to mention that now we're going to do interesting test with a 40 amp in PPT in a 20 amp in PPT and because if you look at the data sheets the efficiency curve will be slightly different depending on which size of controller you have so there might be a difference here so we've got seventy three seventy two point eight seventy three seventy two point eight down here we have seventy two point five seventy two point seven so it's like a 1% difference but this produces more power but it's because this is a 40 amp versus a 20 amp this is also dependent on the size of the solar panel attached to it and if you look at the data sheet you can see the efficiency curve but like I said it's only a difference of like one percent up to three percent but it is a real thing that you can measure so it's interesting the seat the next part of our test we have some more sunshine but it's pretty cloudy and we're gonna compare the output of PWM and MPPT we have an MPPT in a pulse width modulation controller and what's going to the battery from the PWM is sixty nine watts and what's going to the battery from the MPPT is 71 watts so that's really good considering the price of this pulse width modulation in actually does really well it's really surprising and to test if our results are consistent I switch the two solar panel wires that are coming in and cuz in case there's a difference and down here we got 71 watts up here we have 69 watts so consistent results and now we have the renergie MPPT versus the PWM by renergie and in full sunshine we're getting 77 watts with MPPT in 72 to 73 watts with the pulse width modulation controllers so that's actually still pretty good I'm pretty impressed by it starting to think that the biggest advantage of MPPT is that you can Sirius connect your panels but I just thought about a workaround so what you could do is get a 24 volt PWM and then Sirius connect 12 volt panels to make a 24 volt panel and then input it and then use a 24 volt battery so that means you can series connect a little bit and still use a PWM and save a lot of money so I'm gonna design a system for that because that would be really cheap and really powerful the Sun is going down we've got 10 watts from the MPPT and 8.8 from the PWM it's destroying it today it's amazing so for our final PWM versus MPPT test we're gonna see how much this one produces over this one so up here we've got 70 watts we've got 72 watts that's incredible even compared to the victor on I mean this is $15 and this is a hundred and fifty dollars you can buy a whole other solar panel and one of my viewers actually told me this in a previous video and I didn't really believe him because I thought of all the other benefits of MPPT but look at these numbers it's look at 70 72 watts the PWM is doing great for its price but like I said this doesn't have tip sensor so if you have LED acid I would not use this but man if you are on a budget this is incredible so after all of those tests what did we learn we learned that pulse width modulation is pretty amazing but I must stress that you cannot Sirius connect with any of these pulse width modulation controllers if you do the output will be reduced by like 50% so if you use this you need a parallel connect and spend more money on wire for my most recent array if I were to use a PWM versus an MPPT instead of spinning $100 I'd have to spend $400 on the wire connecting my solar panel arrays so if you're going to use these make sure you use branch connectors and you parallel connect and you understand that the solar panels need to be close to the controller if not you don't want to use these but for a lot of people on a budget in a van or an RV this is actually a great option and I stand corrected I actually said in a previous video and some guy had disagreed with me and he's right he did make a good point and if you're on a budget these super cheap MPPT is produced the same amount of power is this Victor on I mean a lot of people say oh the Victor on is Bluetooth has multi-point tracking but under most circumstances you guys will probably not notice that and you probably don't need to check it every 10 minutes so if you're on a budget for MPPT this is great actually the price of this is like 33 to 35 dollars and this one's like 7 d dollars so honestly for the price as an MPPT this is great for most systems but if you want the best and cheap this is the way to go I love this thing it's like 200 bucks for a 40 amp MPPT and it does everything I've used these for years I love these things and then if you want fancy options or if you want to have like different disconnects at different voltages and a full complex system that's large you should go with the Vic Tron but like I said I don't like the input terminals and it gets really hot but yeah it's a good option still I still like them I like all of these actually and I would use this one for like small tiny like maybe a bicycle trailer with some solar panels on it this I would use for like some lady that doesn't need to program it ever in her life this one I would use if somebody wants to program any battery and also if you're trying to make a complex system that you would have to use a big tron for but you're on a budget use this one because yes it has really outputs it has all sorts of different modules that you can mess with so this is a great option too if you want to cheap EP ever that's cheaper than this one this is actually a really good buy too so it really depends on what you want but I think they're all pretty good they're really good charge controllers so yeah I hope you guys like this video there's a lot to talk about but yeah I hope you guys learned something so yeah this was really fun um please leave a comment below and let me know if you learned anything I also have a whole web page dedicated to these solar charge controllers I will have links below for all of these charge controllers and yeah I'll talk to you guys later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 1,186,967

Rating: 4.9108911 out of 5

Keywords: off grid solar, will prowse, diy solar, rv solar, solar charge controller review, how to choose a solar charge controller, will prowse solar

Id: kF_cVEYxj3E

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/bigcanuck42]

At lower Panel voltages you will see little to no differences. The benifits are when you want to push more Wattage on small wires from the panels and want to increase the voltage from the Panels

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Since P=I*V P being Power in watts when you want to increase Wattage but not increase the Current (I) you need to increase the Voltage. We do this by combining panels in series.

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A MPPT charge controller can take the higher voltages and lower current and convert that into the same wattage but at the battery voltages. meaning current then goes up to the battery.

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If you were to use a PWM all you would get is the the Wattage of the current the panel can output at the Battery voltage.

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For example

Charging a 12V battery (assume 14V for charging)

2 panels in series each with V of 35V and Current of 8 Amps 8Amps coming in to the battery at 14V = 8*14 = 112Watts

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Now take those Panels @ a combines 70V @ 8Amps = 560Watts

Converting that down to 14V the Amps would go to 560/14 = 40A and just check 14V * 40A = 560W

[u/ho_merjpimpson]

happened to stumple upon this video. at my cabin we currently have 2x 100w renogy panels charging a single group size 31 deep cycle via a 30a renogy pwm controller.

someone once told me that mppt can have as much as a 200% effiency increase, particularly in low light conditions. well, i saw how much the renogy mppt controllers are dropping, so i figured hell.. might as well upgrade.. so i picked up a 20a mppt last week.

but then i saw this video which seems to show that the mppt and pwm output nearly identically. and if that is truly the case, id rather return the mppt and not mess with something that is working fairly well already.

but then again, mppt would allow me to change the panels to run in series and save some line loss. but the distance from panels to the controller is only about 25'

[u/Funless]

The larger the difference between the voltage of the battery and the voltage of the panel determines how much you're going to save with an mppt. Since he is using panels that are made for 12 volt batteries, the pwm is going to be just as efficient.

If he were to use a typical roughly 400 w panel that you use on a roof, there would be a massive difference between the pwm and mppt. That's because a roof panel usually runs around 40 volts.

[u/Darrentime187]

Doesn’t a mppt controller take the extra bolts and convert them to amps???

[u/viol8tion]

This guy is 100% on top of the game. He has tons of reviews and DIY guides on YouTube and I am positive he mentions the superiority of MPPT over PWM many times.

[u/tonyowner]

I work designing solar system and this guy knows what his talking about. So far, all his vedeos has been very good.

[u/secessus]

seems to suggest no advantage of MPPT over PWM?

I started the video at a random location and within 5 seconds he gave an MPPT advanage (wiring cost reduction with series configs).